Essay on Meaningful Use for Nurses: Implications and Recommendations
The current paper focuses on the problem of meaningful use for nurses and recommendations concerning this issue in the contemporary clinical setting. At first, the paper provides the overview of meaningful use for nurses and gives insights to the essence of this concept. The next part of the paper uncovers the detailed analysis of the meaningful use for nurses and its application in the contemporary clinical setting. In fact, the paper reveals possible challenges and difficulties associated with the application of meaningful use for nurses in the health care environment. Finally, recommendations concerning the current application of the meaningful use for nurses are provided and the paper is summed up with the conclusion. The findings of the paper reveal the gap between new technologies and their potential and nurses’ understanding of their use grows wider that deteriorates the quality of nursing care and decreases the effectiveness of the application of new technologies in nursing care. Therefore, meaningful use is one of the main challenges for nurses today but the successful implementation of new technologies and innovations can improve consistently the quality of nursing care and increase the effectiveness of nurses’ performance.
Overview of meaningful use for nurses
Meaningful Use is an umbrella term for rules and regulations that, among other things, involve electronic record keeping and e-documentation of care that hospitals and physicians must meet to qualify for federal incentive funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). At the same time, meaningful use has broader implications since nurses deal with diverse technologies, which they have to be able to apply successfully and consciously.
In fact, meaningful use was designed to occur in three stages:
- Stage 1 began in 2011 and involved adoption of computerized physician order entry (CPOE) (France, et al., 2009).
- Stage 2, which impacts nursing, brings greater emphasis, among other things, on disease management, clinical decision support, transition of care, documentation of care plans and patient access to health information. In the original proposal for stage 2, healthcare providers must record care plan fields, including goals and discharge instructions within 36 hours of being released from the hospital, for more than 10 percent of patients. Although stage 2 begins in 2012 only, final regulations have not been publicized. The federal government solicited public comment on proposed stage 2 regulations until May 7 and are reviewing those comments. Final regulations will be published in August or September, according to Murphy (Singer, et al., 2009).
- Little has been explained about stage 3, which begins in 2015, and is expected to continue building on the goals of stage 1 and 2 (Hartmann, et al., 2009).
In such a way, the implementation of meaningful use is occurring now and this issue remains under-regulated, to a certain extent, while new regulations will be introduced along with the introduction of new technologies and respective legal norms and rules.
The wide introduction of new technologies in the field of health care and nursing care raises the problem of their effective use of nurses because often nurses are unprepared to use new technologies (Singer, et al., 2009). The complexity of new technologies and the lack of understanding of their application to nursing care raises the problem of widening gap between nurses’ attitude to new technologies as unimportant and routine and the real potential of new technologies.
Analysis of meaningful use for nurses
The use of information technologies, e-documentation and other technological advances can apparently facilitate the performance of nurses and increase their effectiveness. New technologies have a considerable potential and can enhance consistently the performance of nurses and improve the quality of nursing care. However, today, the problem is that nurses cannot always use the full potential of new technologies, especially information ones and have difficulties with the adoption of new technologies.
On the other hand, the introduction of technological innovations and their meaningful use by nurses raises the problem of their effective application by nurses and some other issues. First, the meaningful use means that new technologies are used effectively and consciously (Speroff, et al., 2010). In this respect, it is worth mentioning the fact that one of the main issues nurses confront today is the lack of the adequate understanding of how to use new technologies and what new technologies serve to that helps nurses to use their full potential.
The unpreparedness of nurses to use new technologies raises another problem, the problem of the meaningful use proper. What is meant here is the fact that nurses face difficulties with adequate understanding what they need new technologies for and how to apply them successfully. For example, nurses often believe that their conventional paper work makes no difference compared to electronic medical records and they use new technologies rather because they are obliged to than because they are aware of the higher effectiveness of new technologies.
Furthermore, the meaningful use raises ethical and legal issues, such as the threat to the privacy right of patients, because e-documents and electronic use of information as well as other technologies implemented in the field of health care services expose the private information of patients to the risk of revelation to third parties, in case of the unauthorized access and misuse of new technologies or available information by nurses.
One of the main challenges for the meaningful use is, therefore, the technological, legal and ethical/cultural unpreparedness of nurses for the meaningful use. From the ethical point of view, nurses cannot always use new information technologies because of their lack of understanding how to apply them properly. Moreover, they may be unaware of possible risks associated with the misuse of new technologies because they do not understand how technologies actually work. As a result, they may uncover the private information of patients to third parties, for example.
In addition, current legal regulations are not always sufficient to regulate the meaningful use of new technologies. As a result, nurses face the problem of technological advancements, on the one hand, and the lack of legal regulations, on the other. Hence, they often confront serious ethical issues and questionable situations, which require clear legal regulations but there are no such regulations so far and they have to take decisions on the ground of their professional ethics and their vision of existing legal norms and particular situation or case.
Meaningful use recommendations
The training of nurses is an essential step to the enhancement of the meaningful use. The training should focus on three major areas, technological, legal and cultural/ethical. The training is essential for the professional development of nurses and their adequate understanding of meaningful use. In fact, the training helps nurses to understand new technologies better and they can also learn how to realize the full potential of new technologies. As a result, nurses will grow aware of the importance of meaningful use and, more important, they will be able to use new technologies adequately and meaningfully.
Technologically, nurses should be able not only to use new technologies but also be able to learn how to use technological innovations successfully. In this regard, training will help nurses to learn new technologies and understand them better. More important, they will be able to learn how to use new technologies autonomously, if they develop basic skills required for the adoption of new technologies. At the same time, new technologies should be user friendly to facilitate the learning their use by nurses.
Nurses should know and understand succinctly new legal norms and regulations concerning the meaningful use. Legal norms evolve and change respectively to changes in the health care setting and under the impact of new technologies that are introduced in the field of health care services. Training can help nurses to learn recent legal changes and respect them in their regular work.
Moreover, the law enforcement and development of clear and extensive legal norms regulating meaningful use is an essential step toward the overall success of meaningful use in the nursing environment. Nurses should have the extensive and clear legal basis, on the ground of which they can perform their professional duties and apply basic meaningful use principles. The introduction of legal changes and new norms is essential the adaptation of existing legal norms to actual technological environment.
Cultural and ethical training is also essential because nurses work in the multicultural environment and they have to respect patients’ cultural norms along with ethical norms associated with the meaningful use, such as the respect to the patients’ confidentiality, for example. Nurses need to expand their cultural views and norms to adapt to the work in the multicultural environment (Speroff, et al., 2010). The enhancement of the communication between nurses and managers of health care organizations can help to communicate key principles of the meaningful use and help nurses to adopt new technologies and principles of work successfully. Finally, meaningful use should motivate nurses to apply it in their regular practices. In this regard, new technologies introduced in the field of health and nursing care should facilitate the work of nurses. For example, they should be user friendly to facilitate their use by nurses but more important they should manifest their advantages and key goals clearly to make their use by nurses meaningful.
Conclusion
Thus, the development of new technologies raises the problem of their meaningful use by nurses, especially in regard to information technologies. In actuality, the development of meaningful use is a long-lasting program that has a solid legal background, which helps nurses to implement new technologies successfully. However, nurses still need training to be able to use new technologies meaningfully. In this regard, it is possible to distinguish three main fields, where extra training of nurses is needed, including legal, technological and cultural/ethical training.
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